We would love to hear from readers who eat cottage cheese about how they like to eat it

Cottage cheese is making a comeback – the mild low-fat cheese is gaining popularity on TikTok and Instagram.

We would love to hear from readers who eat cottage cheese about how they like to eat it. What are your favourite recipes involving cottage cheese? Share your recipes and tips on the best cottage cheese meals below.

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Consumers, farmers and even McDonald’s struggle in shortage blamed on irregular weather

Listening to the chatter at Delhi’s vegetable markets, only one question is on everyone’s lips: just how much will a tomato cost today?

Prices of tomatoes, a staple of Indian cooking, have soared by more than 400% in recent weeks as the country has been gripped by a nationwide shortage.

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These recipes for fried rice and mini pancake are a great – and thrifty – introduction to cooking with the everyday Korean staple

Across Korea, kimchi is eaten throughout the day, either alongside or as an integral ingredient of every meal. There are endless varieties, from the ubiquitous fire-red, spicy hit of baechu cabbage kimchi to the altogether more subtly flavoured but no less addictive dongchimi radish water kimchi. Here in the UK, kimchi is now widely available, and while it is wonderful eaten raw, these mini kimchi pancakes and kimchi fried rice are a great way to cook with it.

Jordan Bourke is a chef, broadcaster and co-author of Our Korean Kitchen (Orion, £25).

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Fresh laurel leaves wreathe this simplest of sauces in pungent glory

A group of young people, two of them wearing laurel wreaths to mark their graduation, arrived in the piazza at 6pm. They joined the mass of kids recently released into a three-month summer holiday, as well as all the locals, visitors, drinks, dripping ice-creams, balls, bikes and dogs that fill the square.

The use of laurel wreaths for the newly graduated traces back to ancient Greece, and the variously told and interpreted myth of Daphne and Apollo . In short, the nymph Daphne is pursued by the god Apollo, intoxicated by Cupid’s arrow. To avoid him, she turns herself/is turned into a laurel tree, at which point he marks the tree into a sacred symbol (one of his many god roles was to make mortals aware of their own guilt and purify them of it). As well as being a creep, Apollo was an archer and athlete, and was also associated with music and poetry. This is why a laurel crown twisted from his sacred symbol became associated with and used to crown victorious athletes, heroes and appointed poets, and then, later, great minds and laureate/ graduates. And why we are reminded not to rest on our laurels.

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Cookery hasn’t been this sexy since since Nigella wore silk robes to lick chocolate from a spoon

He leans over a sizzling saucepan, wearing a well-fitting T-shirt that shows off his tattooed arms. To protect his T-shirt (ones that make your arms look that good don’t come cheap), he is wearing an apron – dark denim, or maybe even leather, but definitely some kind of masculine fabric, a bit blacksmith-adjacent. He rakes back his hair from an aesthetically sweat-beaded brow and frowns in concentration as he adjusts the seasoning. Mmmm, delicious. Is this making you hungry? Or is it making you … “thirsty”, as the kids say?

The hot chef, lust-object de nos jours , is about to get even hotter. The second series of The Bear , already streaming in the US and available in the UK from 19 July, brings grouchy-yet-inexplicably-adorable chef “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, back to our screens just as summer hits its peak. Oh, and if you have a sweet tooth, you may be interested to hear about the new guest star – pastry chef Luca, played by 30-year-old British actor Will Poulter, who told Variety magazine he “ literally begged to be in the show” to realise “a dream of playing a chef on TV” and that he has an “immense amount of respect” for people in the food and service industry. To prepare for the role, Poulter spent time in the kitchen at the London restaurants St John, Black Axe Mangal (now F.K.A.B.A.M.), and Trullo. He described one particular shift in the Black Axe Mangal kitchen as “maybe the most satisfying day of work I’ve ever had in my life”.

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Villagers who have kept pre-Hispanic milpa methods alive for years are seeing new markets spring up in the Yucatán

Teresa de Jesús Cen Requena is washing burgundy okra and a rainbow of freshly dug carrots at Mestiza de Indias, a regenerative agricultural project hidden down a dirt track in the jungle near the Maya village of Espita. “You used to be able to live from your milpa,” the farm worker says, referring to the traditional smallholding. “But now many people from the village go to Cancún because they want modern luxuries.

“You can’t buy a mobile phone with a bag of beans but I don’t care – I am connected to this land.”

Teresa de Jesús Cen Requena, who works at the Mestiza de Indias regenerative farm, stands outside her home with her mother-in-law in their huipiles

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The traditional staple is losing the battle with more convenient and cheaper alternative foods

The Dojima branch of Yoshinoya in Osaka is doing a roaring lunchtime trade. As soon as one diner vacates their counter seat, another takes their place, while staff take just seconds to assemble the next order of the restaurant’s trademark dish: gyūdon .

The Observer has joined the rush, ordering a set lunch of seasoned beef and onion on rice, and side dishes of pickled cabbage and miso soup – all for a extremely affordable ¥632 (£3.46).

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Summer fruit is glorious in these sweet and savoury dishes

Summer blazes on. I return from the market not with a bag of lush greens but with an assortment of scarlet ingredients: a huge wedge of watermelon, bags of cherries, tomatoes, radishes and punnets of deep red berries.

Watermelon is something of a permanent resident in my fridge throughout the mid to late summer. Hacked into thick slices, the sweet crimson flesh turns up in salads with feta cheese or ricotta, as a chilled gazpacho-style soup with red peppers and radishes, tossed with mint sprigs or, as I ate last autumn in Beirut, with pomegranate molasses, tomatoes and toasted sourdough.

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Don’t melt in the heat, turn to an iced chocolate instead

We’re getting to that time of year where talking about chocolate, and certainly tasting it, becomes challenging. Many small-scale sellers refuse to send chocolate in the post at this time due to melting; but you shouldn’t be too annoyed since I think that shows a certain care and responsibility.

Thus it’s a good time of year to make iced chocolate, but where most people go wrong with this is to use melted chocolate, which starts to resolidify when it hits cold milk. What you really need is a good chocolate sauce. Hanbit Cho (search for him on YouTube) has a good recipe for iced chocolate which is worth trying.

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